It gets in your head that you brush after eating when you wake up and when you go to sleep. Yeah that’s all well and good, but those are times that don’t have a lot of motivation and control…So just…brush your teeth at a different time.
You go to the bathroom in the middle of the day and are like “I should brush my teeth” DO IT!!!! Don’t listen to the other half of that sentence that says “shit but it’s not the right time”
I don’t care if you’re about to eat, or get coffee, or whatever.
Honestly this hack will solve most of problems. Just stop assigning meaningless “right” and “wrong” to tasks and start saying “I can pretty much do whatever I want whenever I want and society and its expectations don’t really matter to me”.
If there’s no barrier in the first place you don’t have to get over it.
huge ADHD hack. if you can get over the “all or nothing”, moralizing, judging aspect of every action you “should” take, you’ll discover you can get more done than you expect.
I’m a big fan of the 2 PM shower. spend a whole morning feeling lazy and guilty, then just decide to start the day over again, even if it is lunchtime.
you can always begin again. any hour, any moment can be the beginning. you can choose that. the clock doesn’t run you, you run the clock
The Witch of Stolen Tomorrows had begun to notice an odd trend amongst her petitioners.
The latest was a farmer. He had braved the journey through the Testing Woods and arrived with his convictions mostly intact. He now sat on a tree stump by the Witch’s thornbush cottage, drinking a cup of bitter tea, and asking for a fairly standard boon.
"Oh yes," said the Witch, "I can make you a spell for a bountiful harvest, but what will you give me in return?"
The farmer gulped. "My firstborn child?"
"By the dick-shattered sky.” The Witch exclaimed. “What?"
"Oh. You don't take firstborn children?"
"I am a witch of ancient promises, timeless dreams, and fresh blood.” The Witch announced. “Of course I take firstborn children. It's just a bit weird that it was your first offer."
"I'm sorry, mistress. I don't know how this works. Was I supposed to start smaller and work my way up to the firstborn? I’ve always been hopeless at haggling." The man seemed on the verge of tears. "My wife passed a few years ago. She used to do all the business at market."
"If your wife passed a few years ago, how exactly do you plan to offer me your firstborn?" The witch swirled her tea and the steam made foul omens in the air. "I mean, sure, you don't have to be married to have kids, but it does usually help if you're not obviously still in mourning."
"Oh, my little Jackie is already born. They're five. My firstborn and, well, my only-born."
"Okay. If the kid has already been born, you don't have to say firstborn. You can just say 'my child, whose name is...' What's the kid's name again?"
“Jackie.”
“Well, you’ve gone and put Jackie in a bit of a precarious spot. You see, now that you’ve offered the child, the fatespring will hate it if I accept a lesser deal. So either I have to talk you into a bargain that’s technically worse for you, or little Jackie comes to live with me. Now, I could-”
“That’s fine mistress. I accept the bargain.” The man sniffled and wiped his tears. He looked weirdly relieved. “So, do I bring Jackie here to you, or will you come to the farm to collect? Or is it one of those ‘leave them in a clearing at the full moon’ kind of-”
“My guy. What is up? What is your deal, exactly? I’ve had, like, five different firstborn deals this week. That’s weird, right? You get that? That’s normally the worst case scenario for y’all. But at least they hadn’t had the kids yet, so they could still fool themselves that they could wriggle out of the compact somehow. And they didn’t lead with ‘oh yeah, take my first child, that’s a strong opening bargaining position!” The canopy around them began to darken and the trees began to grow thorns. “And if there’s one thing that really gets on my flat-ass witch tits, it’s when there’s something going on I don’t understand. So what in the ever-boiling piss is up?”
The trembling farmer forced out the words, “It’s, uh, it’s the levy, mistress.”
“The levy? What levy?”
“The king, mistress. He’s put a levy out. He needs troops.”
“Why would he want a child to be pressed into military service?”
“It’s the prophecy, mistress. A great foretelling came down from the Speaker of the Fates, or so the criers say. In 18 years, a great darkness will come. It will bring war and ruin to the kingdom. It will shatter the crown. So the king is demanding we send every child who’ll be over 16 when the omens come due. They’ll get raised as warriors and heroes, so they say.” The farmer looked up at the Witch, a hint of hope shining through the desperation that had cracked him. “Only, none of us want to pay the king’s fateprice with our kids. And Mrs Goodwhistle, she said that you’d probably give them a good life.
“Or, at least… you’d give them some kind of life.”
The Witch said nothing for a long while.
Then she stood up.
“I guess I’d better get a shift on then.” The briar-bound cottage behind them pricked up its leaves like they were ears.
“You’re… you’re leaving?”
“Oh, don’t fret. I’ll take little Jackie with me. I’ll take all of them.” The witch’s home unravelled, all its branches and brambles writhing down to follow its roots into the ground. “If my hearth is going to become a daycare for all the poor little prophecy-pocked bairns of this land, I’m going to need more space. And I’ll need to take them somewhere harder to find…”
“Oh, thank you, mistress!”
The Witch flicked something to the farmer, who caught it instinctively. In his sweaty palm was a seed - though it was older, darker and heavier than normal.
“There’s your harvest spell. Appropriate payment, as the scalekeepers demand. Each morning, when you go to bring in the harvest - look to the sky. When the sun is just tickling the horizon, reap a single ear of corn and put it aside. Whisper into it as if you’re talking to your child. Jackie will hear you. In the deepest part of winter, roast and eat that corn - then you’ll get your reply.”
“I… I have no words…” The farmer’s eyes and throat burned.
“No need for them. The deal must be made and the price must be paid.” The Witch held out a hand and a nearby tree bent its limbs down to meet her, offering a branch. “Now, I have much to prepare, so I will take my leave. The woods will see you home.”
And the witch took the living branch from the tree and sat upon it like a broom, then rose into the sky like a sunrise.
---
18 years later, the Witch of Stolen Tomorrows returned to the kingdom. The earth trembled as her thorned fortress - a living wilderness - bore her onwards on a thousand root-wrought feet.
Standing atop the briar parapets was the Witch’s cadre of apprentices. They were all teens and twenty-somethings, clad in the colours of autumn skies and wielding the instruments of fate.
The king, far away in his keep, felt a strange shiver through the gold of his crown. An echo of its coming shattering.
The Witch hung from a giant thorn like a sailor from a bowsprit. In her free hand, she cradled a cup of tea.
“Here is a lesson about prophecies.” She said it softly, but the rushing winds carried the words to her students. “If you fight them, they’ll put you on like a jacket and wear you as a costume as they dance ruin through your life. But if you grab them by the scruff, then you can be the one wearing destiny as your cloak.
“And then you get to be the one writing the story.”
Trolling my biologist D&D player by sending the party on a quest to prevent the destruction of a mystical seal, and when they finally get there it quickly becomes clear that I'm actually describing a walrus.
Please save and share this info where possible. This report has since been removed by Amnesty International due to legal threats of libel from JK Rowling. This information is no longer easily accessible.
So this one time I was in a hospital recovering from an emergency surgery on my leg, and had to be there long enough that they had to change my bedding, so, doped up on three kinds of pain meds and antibiotics my dad wheels me into the hallway while the nurses work.
"dad" I say, my eyes barely open "it's Colonel Sanders" while pointing down the hallway. He looks, and at the end of the hallway, there's a portrait of an old man, the donor who paid for the wing of the hospital I'm recovering in.
My dad explains as much to me, and goes "I mean the guy *kinda* looks like him, but why would Colonel Sanders pay for a hospital wing Mississauga Ontario? I think those drugs might me messing with you"
Then the nurse comes out of the room. I go "hey, who is that picture of?"
She looks at the portrait. She looks at me. She looks at my dad. She looks at the painting. She looks at me again.
Jonathan Blake, one of the first people diagnosed with HIV in the UK, is still alive and will turn 75 in three weeks time. Just in case you wanted to know.
I’m just thinking about how many times I’ve heard my dad on a long call with an obvious scammer and I’ll start begging him to get off the phone because I always think he’s a very easy mark and he’ll just keep going and then after a while he’ll say something like “I died 20 years ago” and hang up.
Virgin Millennial Daughter with 20 hrs of screentime a day: Dad! They’re scamming you! Dad! Stop! They will take your savings and your identity! Hang up before they SWAT you!
Chad Boomer dad with a flip phone he has not recharged since 2014: Well gee I wish I could give you my bank account number after you spent all this time on the phone explaining this car deal with me but I don’t have access to my finances because I am in Rikers for felony murder.
On July 20, 1969, 109 hours and 42 minutes after launch, Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin entered the lunar lander ‘Eagle’, made a final check, and the Eagle undocked from the lunar orbiter ‘Columbia’, where the third member of the crew Michael Collins, stayed in orbit around the moon.
Partially manually piloted by Armstrong, the Eagle landed 0 degrees, 41 minutes, 15 seconds north moon latitude and 23 degrees, 26 minutes east moon longitude. Armstrong stepped out, and Aldrin followed 20 minutes later: human beings stepped on the moon for the first time. The two men spent 21 hours and 26 minutes on its surface.
One of the astounding aspects of the mission was the seeming simplicity of the technology used to get man to the moon. According to Oliver Gassmann, professor of Technology Management, the mobile phone in your pocket has one million times more memory than the Apollo 11’s computer. Same about the procesor: the latest phones typically have more than 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed man on the moon 50 years ago.
“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” –Neil Armstrong
(gifs from the documentary Chasing The Moon, 2019)
The reason I probably shouldn't be allowed to make movies is I have no impulse control and I would immediately make something called Revenge Of The Dead Tranny Hooker. It would be about a trans woman trying to break into acting, but no one wants to hire her for anything except playing a sex worker who gets murdered. Then one day she does an open casting call which runs her through a series of increasingly bizarre line readings, which it turns out are meant to summon an eldritch demon to grant the movie producer god-like powers.
The culmination is supposed to be sex on the casting couch, but she ditches at the last minute, destroying the ritual and splintering the extradimensional entity across California. She unknowingly receives powerful extradimensional blood, while the rest of the fragments seek out the powerful and violent people of the world. Meanwhile the movie producer uses his new powers to transform his PAs into henchcreatures, and sends them after the protag to finish her off. She discovers her new powers in the ensuing fight, which also seem to be gradually altering her body every time she uses them.
The rest of the movie is a steadily escalating game of cat and mouse between trans woman and movie producer. While the former transformers the fragments into powerful psychic weapons like chainsaws and spiked bats, the later uses fragments to make himself bigger and physically stronger. At first the fights are short and brutal, the protag outmatched and outgunned, but she gets more confident to the point of an anarchic battle of against the LAPD led by a demonic police captain, including a scene where she stands on the roof of a speeding police car and rips the driver through the windshield.
Her eventual form is some kind hyper sexual draconic mantid squid rippling with biomechanoid components. In the fight with the producer he thinks he's winning by tearing apart the last of her human flesh, but this just complete her transformation, letting her easily overwhelm him. It's implied from that point forward she plans to conquer the world.
